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Trouble on the self-publishing journey

I thought I’d document where I am on my journey to becoming an Indie Author:

Bamboozled.

Skint.

Knackered.

Not writing very much except To Do lists.

I joked recently that becoming an Indie Author is more like setting up a business than being creative. Except it’s not that funny – it’s true. This is what I’ve been doing for the last two months:

Researching editors, writing briefs, obtaining quotes, making decisions about spending large sums of money I may never recoup, then waiting. Then eventually getting the edits back and sinking under the weight of the changes to be made.

Commissioning cover pictures and designs, at considerable cost, and with conflicting advice about where to go and who to use. Make sure your book cover stands out!But make sure you also blend in with others books of the same type! Er, right.

Learning about book formatting, metadata, PDFs, epub and mobi files, en-dashes, em-dashes and hyphens and the havoc they can wreak if you use the wrong type. Yawn.

Doing an online course about algorithms. Yes, bloody algorithms. It seems I should plan my ebook launch in minute detail to try to trick the Amazon algorithms into pushing me higher up the various bestseller lists than I would go without an hourly plan of sponsored facebook adverts, twitter campaigns and book blog tours. Just writing that sentence made me feel a little ill, and it’s probably incorrect. I have no idea. I wasn’t actually paying that much attention and I’d say it was mid-way through that webinar that I noticed I’d reached the ‘fuck it’ stage.

So my ebook might not ride as high as it could in the Amazon charts. Fuck it.

So my book cover might not be quite as thriller-like as others of a similar genre. Fuck it.

So I could, and should, probably proof my manuscript one more time. But I can practically recite all 78k words off by heart. I simply CANNOT read it again. If there’s a typo lurking in there somewhere… yes, fuck that typo. It can stay put.

HOWEVER…I decided not to get off the book train at the fuck-it station (sorry, terrible metaphor, but, well…fuck it, of course). I slept on it, took a weekend off, and somehow recovered my enthusiasm. Except for the algorithms. I’m not going to worry about them. But I’ve had my cover redesigned, I’ve found a company to do the ebook formatting and I’ve parted with yet more money to have the book professionally proof-read.